Dante and Virgil by William-Adolphe Bouguereau - 1850 - 281 x 225 cm Musée d'Orsay Dante and Virgil by William-Adolphe Bouguereau - 1850 - 281 x 225 cm Musée d'Orsay

Dante and Virgil

oil on canvas • 281 x 225 cm
  • William-Adolphe Bouguereau - November 30, 1825 - August 19, 1905 William-Adolphe Bouguereau 1850

Please look at this painting and please tell me how anyone could not love French 19th century art?  : D

The painting depicts a scene from Dante's Divine Comedy, which narrates a journey through Hell by Dante and his guide Virgil. In the scene the author and his guide are looking on as two damned souls are entwined in eternal combat. One of the souls is an alchemist and heretic named Capocchio. He is being bitten on the neck by the trickster Gianni Schicchi, who had used fraud to claim another man's inheritance.

In the 1850s, Dante was very popular and loved among the Romantics. The critic and poet Théophile Gautier was very complimentary: "Gianni Schicchi throws himself at Capocchio, his rival, with a strange fury, and Monsieur Bouguereau depicts magnificently through muscles, nerves, tendons and teeth, the struggle between the two combatants. There is bitterness and strength in this canvas – strength, a rare quality!” 

Everything in this painting underlines the feeling of terribilita and horror: a theme to which Bouguereau would never again return.

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P.S. Here are the best male nudes in art history! <3